69. Performance Art and Digital Cultures

As algorithms, virality, and platform economies structure contemporary modes of viewing, performance art finds itself caught increasingly difficult entanglements with digital media. This session explores how performance art – a genre long concerned with temporality, presence, and documentation – contends with artistic production, circulation, and reception in our screen-saturated, algorithm-led “digital age”.

In ‘Disordered Attention’ (2024), Claire Bishop describes not only contemporary performance strategies that adopt the temporal logics of digital systems (looping, refreshing, long-duration), but also hybrid spectatorial modes such as scrolling, (live-)streaming, and skimming. From Lynn Herschman Leeson to Candela Capitan and Nina Davies, numerous artists have considered screen technologies and networked systems as they complicate issues of identity, virtuality, and embodiment in performance practices.

Attuned to the necessity of historicising performance art’s convergences with digital technologies, this session welcomes papers that address any of the following: how performance artists and audiences appropriate, subvert, or yield to digital media and its logics; how the material conditions of bodies and screens collide with, transform, or confront each other; how performance strategies variously resist, or become imbricated in, profit-generating digital platforms; how performance art mobilises digital forms to articulate marginalised or non-hegemonic subjectivities; and other related topics. We also invite discussions of performance art that utilises screenshots, hyperlinks, gifs, memes, and other visual motifs scattered across digital interfaces. Contributions may take the form of research papers, performance-lectures, performances, or video works.

Themes: Performance, digital, body

Additional format comment: We would like to invite research papers, but also performance-lectures, performances, and video works in the session..

Lead Convenor: Anja Segmueller, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Miguel Arrais Pacheco, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Tiffany Wu, Yale University, USA

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.